“No,” she replied with the shake of a head. “I’m learning a lot about the individual components of the chimera, but still not sure how it’s becoming infectious, or what it’s doing in people’s brains.”
“Chimera?” asked Jason from the back.
“It’s an artificial creation. A chimera is when you combine several components of different species together to form one. The original terminology came from ancient Greece where they made up a mythological creature with various body parts from different animals,” she explained. She hadn’t really known about the mythological beast before, but during her initial searches on other chimera work that was one of the first images that came up.
“Why would someone create one?” Jason asked.
Judy wasn’t sure if Jason just wanted something to help him not think about the traffic jam they were stuck in, or if he was genuinely interested. But she was happy to try to explain it all to the group.
“Well, so far all the chimeras have used parts of humans,” she continued.
“No way,” exclaimed Linda.
Everyone seemed shocked as they looked at her after this statement.
“The problem is most laypeople picture humans with various animal body parts when they hear about that, like humans with gills or wings,” Judy described.
“Bullshit, they’ve done that?! How come we haven’t seen pictures or heard about this before?” Jason shouted.
Judy shook her head before continuing. “No, they haven’t done that,” she sounded a little exasperated. She wished they would stop interrupting her and just let her finish her explanation.
“There’s never been a case of a human designed as a hybrid, that would be illegal and unethical. But they were able to design mice, rabbits, and even pigs with minor insertions of human cells. You’ve probably seen the famous picture of the naked mouse with a human ear growing on its back. All these chimeras were primarily the animal species with small adjustments to make part of their genome human, so that they could be better animal models of human diseases or better test subjects for drug experimentation.”
“The poor animals,” interjected Linda.
“But it’s all to help us,” said Judy.
“That doesn’t make it right. Maybe this apocalypse is our pay back for meddling with things we shouldn’t have. Serves us right for playing with fire and for sacrificing animals in the process,” she replied.
Judy was a little puzzled by Linda’s believes, but wondered if there was some religious background explaining them. Though she considered herself an atheist, Judy had been exposed to many ancient religions in Taiwan. All of them saw animals as lesser beings to humans. Plus she had been exposed to the science fields by age three, and vivisection was just something that she assumed was necessary for the advancement of science.
"Well, the other part of this that doesn’t make sense to me is how fast it’s happening,” Judy continued.
“How so?” asked Linda.
“It’s just too rapid. I would think that the infection would take a couple days to be transmitted, unless it was airborne,” she said, causing a couple jaws to drop. Greg was the only one who seemed relaxed but that was because he and Judy had talked about this already. Judy continued on.
“We know it’s not airborne. I’ve been exposed that way many times, as now you and Greg have too. We would have contracted it already if it was airborne. Especially if all these other people were getting it from breathing it in. It’s more likely transmitted through bites as evidenced by our mother,” Judy choked a little as she said this last sentence before continuing.
“But then the only way it was already in California when I caused the outbreak on the island was if it was already in California. Like someone had planted it there,” Judy concluded.
“And then there is the whole situation of the FBI planting that truck full of infected at your building,” Greg brought up.
“But why would the government want to let this infection spread?” asked Jason.
“Who knows. Population control? An act of war?” suggested Linda.
“The initial proposals from Viratech were to create super soldiers. People who had enhanced senses and higher pain thresholds. It looks like a lot of funding might have come from the Department of Defense, but then there was also funding from The Red Cross and several pharmaceutical companies. The fact that this experiment backfired and creates undead soldiers instead of super soldiers was a mistake, something that went wrong. Though someone manipulated the genome in the last stages to add in this last part that I haven’t accounted for. It was planned, but maybe not by everyone involved,” Judy explained.
Silence filled the car. Everyone seemed to be contemplating this explanation, thinking about the repercussions.
“Hey, what’s that up there?” Greg asked. Everyone’s attention shifted through the front windshield
At this point the sounds of horns blaring had become a constant cacophony, so most of them in the car had started ignoring it as background noise. But Greg was right, the honking ahead seemed more urgent and frequent. Judy peered through the windshield and saw people getting out of their cars about a quarter mile away. There was one thing in common about all this motion: they were all running their way.
“That doesn’t look promising,” said Jason sarcastically.
Judy was pretty sure she knew what was causing this new change in behavior, but she still felt an instinctual need to lean forward in her chair and squint her eyes harder to try to observe what was going on behind these fleeing citizens.
She could appreciate some movement, and as it came in to focus her fears were confirmed: several people were shambling forward amongst the cars, walking irregularly and gnashing their teeth together. Or at least they had been people at one point, before they had been turned in to whatever they were now. Some bizarre chimera controlled monst-
WHACK!
Judy screamed. She was unexpectedly startled out of her thoughts and pushed back out of her seat towards Linda.
More thuds were heard throughout the car as the others shouted. Judy stared in to the lifeless eyes of the very monster she was just imagining half a mile ahead of them.
She silently stared at the creature. This one had previously been a man, now covered in a layer of filth, his clothes tattered. His teeth made a bone chilling snap as he chomped against the glass, his nose and mouth pressed firmly there. A large area of condensation was forming on the window where he was breathing.
A sharp jab in the back and Judy finally snapped out of it, realizing Linda was yelling at her. In fact, most of the people in the car were yelling, but Linda’s shouting was directed at Judy.
“Judy get off the fucking stick!” she yelled as she pushed Judy back in to her seat and closer to the infected man.
Even though there was a strong layer of glass between the, Judy had to will herself to move closer to the monster before her.
Greg reached up from behind her and placed a reassuring hand on her chest to hold her in place.
Once Judy was back in her seat, Linda shifted back in to drive and turned towards the zombie. It seemed like the wrong direction, but it was the only way potentially off the highway since there were in line with an exit ramp to their right.
Linda was about to floor it towards the exit ramp when Greg shouted at her.
“Stop!”
“Are you fucking kidding me? No way!” Linda shouted back.
“Give me one second!” Greg yelled. He pulled out the handgun he had picked up back at the station.
“Lower the window, but just an inch or two” he instructed Linda.
She looked back at him incredulously. Being that they were in a police vehicle there were no passenger accessible window or lock controls in the back.
“Linda, I think I know what he wants to do. Just lower the window an inch or two,” Jason said.
Linda turned, mouth still gaping to Jason. He nodded at her sternly.
Meanwhile th
e infected man had continued his relentless barrage of Judy’s window.
Linda hesitated, but then used the window controlled to lower it two inches. The monster glanced at it out of the corner of its eyes.
Greg yelled at the monster as he pointed his gun out the crevice. “Hey you, yeah you! Over here!”
The infected man slowly turned towards the noise and smell of humans emanating from the window. Just as Greg had hoped, the monster clawed up towards the opening, and with the nozzle of his gun pointed down it reached up with its mouth and started biting at the end of the gun.
With a quick pull of the trigger Gregory blew a hole through the back of its skull, and the monster fell to the ground.
“Go Linda!” ordered Jason.
Linda floored it.
In short order they made it on to the end of the ramp. Linda flicked her lights on and started tearing under the highway they had just come off of. More thuds caused Judy to shriek, but this time they weren’t infected.
They were being forced to drive under the bridge that was the highway they had just left above them. Bodies started littering down on them, and they realized several uninfected humans were jumping from the highway to the road below, most dying on impact, others breaking bones. The chaos above must have left them all very desperate to resort to those measures.
Judy squeezed her eyes shut and tried not to think about the broken limbs and horrific injuries these people were willing to sustain in order to avoid what could only be seen as a worse fate back on the highway.
They weaved and swayed past injured bodies, following several other speeding cars away from the confusion. Blaring horns were just part of the scenery now. On a couple occasions Judy heard expletives screamed at them in particular, probably because they were fleeing in a police vehicle.
After they reached a more calm area of back roads Linda slowed the vehicle down and turned off the siren.
“Why the hell did you have to do that? We could have been on the ramp and on our way immediately,” she asked Greg and Jason.
“That was one less infected for those people on the highway to have to fight. I know we are trying to save ourselves, but the ultimate goal is to save the world from this epidemic. And every uninfected person counts. Even if that means preventing an infected from infecting more.”
Would that one person be enough? Her courses on population genetics made Judy skeptical. Herd health was the only way to save the human race now. But maybe Gregory was right and culling individuals was a good idea as well. It was just that in order to really make a difference in that arena, her training told her they would have to just destroy all the people, healthy and sick, in a wide area to prevent spread of the disease. And naturally this was something everyone would be aversive to, especially her. Who knew how far this infection extended? What if it had already gotten to the entire world?
Chapter 34
Judy got a small taste of just how far the infection had impacted the world over the following surreal five days. Rather than risk getting stranded or trapped on a highway again, the four of them drove north through back roads and National Parks to try taking a less traveled route. It sure seemed to be working.
Judy had never been in such desolate, abandoned places before in her life. She didn’t know if their lack of cell service was from being in the middle of nowhere, or from a collapse in the communications system countrywide.
She was also used to living in areas of the country where it rarely snowed, and the year round temperature was close to seventy-five degrees. Once out of California it became apparent to everyone that winter was right around the bend for the rest of the country. Leaves had already changed color or fallen to the ground, the temperature in many places was close to freezing, and some of the country was dusted in a thin layer of snow.
Maybe in a different scenario a lot of these places would have been considered beautiful. The redwood trees in northeastern California were certainly mind blowing. But it was difficult to appreciate their wonder when everything felt so ominous, like you wouldn’t know when or where a group of infected would surprise you.
Their group was lucky in that the random path they took seemed to be avoiding the majority of the infected. But that could probably be attributed to the fact that they were jut in less populated areas, and avoiding major highways or clusters of human population meant much slower travel.
Most of the towns they drove through were relatively abandoned, or at least seemed that way. Movement behind windows and the lack of infected walking around made Judy think that everyone in these tiny towns had just holed up. The chilly weather wasn’t the only reason Judy found herself shivering all the time.
They had stopped at a town wide meeting outside Twin Falls, Idaho for a night and updated those running the meeting on what they knew from where they had traveled. The townsfolk there returned the favor and explained that they knew Vancouver had been hit hard, as many of the new migrants to their town were from Canada. Sadly for Greg the farthest east anyone had come from was Nebraska, and there were already small outbreaks of infected there. There was an elderly couple from Nebraska that had headed to Idaho to try to meet up with their son and his family, and thankfully they had found them all in one piece. The town was working on organizing barricades around certain parts of the community and coming up with ways to allocate resources and give those migrants to the town jobs to help.
Judy had been comforted and inspired by their resilience, but she also realized that situations like theirs were probably only possible in small towns where everyone knew everyone else. Anyone who had come from a major city had described more horrors and chaos then she waned to imagine.
The morning after their night in Twin Falls they had continued on, after trading some weapons for several barrels of gas for their trip. They had stock piled a large amount of weapons and felt comfortable handing some of them away, though Jason seemed the least thrilled with this trade agreement. But money wasn’t really anything people were thinking about since all the large stores were already pretty raided, and all the small shops were the same or were being fortified by their owners.
They did risk stopping for supplies at a grocery store outside of Billings, Montana one day. The store was all boarded up with signs saying “Closed until further notice”, but Jason didn’t seem to feel bad at all about breaking in and stocking up on more canned goods and water.
He laughed and shook his head at Greg when he left the last of the cash he had in his wallet at the front counter of the store by the register. Judy knew that his brother always did the right thing and had a stronger sense of morals than all of them combined, but all she could do was smile at him and pat him on the back for the gesture. She was also grateful he wasn’t trying to leave any valuables at the store. He could give away all the money he wanted at this point and no one in their group would protest.
The whole time they had avoided major highways, which still seemed to have some decent car flow on them whenever they passed under or over them. They saw a couple cars every ten to fifteen minutes on their back roads, many topped with suitcases or dragging trailers behind them. It was mostly smooth sailing.
This manner of travel made it so it had been almost a full week from when they had left, and now four days after when Greg had hoped they would be in Chicago. They had hopped back on a highway, I-94, earlier that day around the western part of North Dakota. While it meant driving past the occasional infected as well as dealing with some broken down cars or debris, they were making better time and hoped to get in to Chicago in another day or two.
“Those clouds pretty much sum up how this entire trip has felt,” Jason said as he peered out the front windshield. A thick, green sky full of dark grey clouds hung before them. Judy shivered for the thousandth time.
Jason was on driving duty and Greg just grunted to his right in the passenger seat. He had become more and more quiet and grumpy as the trip went on, likely from the frustration of not being able to reach
his son on the phone or get to Chicago as quickly as he would like.
Linda was gently snoring in the back seat next to her as Judy peered over her brother’s shoulder out the front of the car. Judy could only remember seeing clouds like that once before when she was in the Philippines, and there had been a pretty violent tropical storm that followed those clouds. She remembered the heavy winds and dark, foreboding sky full of heavy green appearing a couple hours before the worst of the storm hit. Even now as she thought about it she could hear the wind whistling outside of the vehicle, jabbing at the car with an occasional gust that threatened to take them all along with it.
As if in sync with her thoughts, a couple raindrops hit the windows of the vehicle. That spattering of raindrops slowly transformed in to a constant barrage.
Chapter 35
Three hours later and the full brunt of this winter storm was hitting them. The rain had converted to snow shortly after they had passed in to Minnesota. They were surrounded by howling winds, swirling snow, and horrific visibility. They were somewhere in the middle of that state and had just come to the consensus that they needed to find somewhere to hole up. Driving was becoming too dangerous and unpredictable.
They had gotten off of I-94 early on and were traveling southeast via Route 10 in order to avoid the major cities like Minneapolis, though they were still a couple hours from the outskirts of that city. Greg had been discussing what might be their best approach to Chicago, but Linda and Jason had finally explained to him they weren’t going to make it there in this storm.
Linda suggested heading to one of the campgrounds that seemed to be plentiful in this land of 10,000 lakes.
They followed signs off the Route to the Sunset Lake County Park, which had advertised cottages, a downtown area, and campgrounds.
Getting to what must have been their downtown, there was already three inches of snow on the ground in spots. There were a couple of cars on the sides of the road that weren’t incredibly covered in snow, implying they had moved there after the snow started. Then Jason spotted a sports bar that looked like it had its lights on.
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